We'll start with one of my favorite articles: Data Organization in Spreadsheets - Broman & Woo (2018) It's so good! Where to start! www.biostat.wisc.edu/~kbroman/pub... - ThreadSky

mekline.bsky.social • 37 days ago

We'll start with one of my favorite articles: Data Organization in Spreadsheets - Broman & Woo (2018)

It's so good! Where to start!

https://www.biostat.wisc.edu/~kbroman/publications/dataorg.pdf

Comments

mekline.bsky.social•37 days ago

This is one of the most practically useful articles I have ever read. An earlier version on Karl's website gets right to the point: https://kbroman.org/dataorg/

mekline.bsky.social•37 days ago

I appreciate how general and non-opinionated the advice is (except for ISO 8601), and what a great job it does at developing intuitions for *why* these rules help you work with and think about data. I read it in grad school and it completely changed the way I thought about data management.

mekline.bsky.social•37 days ago

At the time, a handful of them made perfect intuitive sense to me - they were things that helped my brain calm down about a data project - and the rest were basically novel to me. (The piece also does a fantastic job not making you feel like a dumbass for not already knowing these principles.)

mekline.bsky.social•37 days ago

I also love how accessible it is - you can basically adopt any one of these rules on its own, and it will make your data work better for you. You can find a change that's least disruptive to your workflow, or notice which rules describe/solve a problem you're having, and plan for next time.

mekline.bsky.social•37 days ago

It's also totally field and tool-agnostic - most of these rules you can apply if you work 100% by hand/manual entry, start with data downloaded from somewhere you don't control, use Excel, write your own scripts, etc. etc. etc.

mekline.bsky.social•37 days ago

I think my favorite rule is "put just one thing in a cell" - what counts as a "thing" is absolutely up to your specific context, but once you know to be on the lookout for columns with multiple things inside, you get really good at spotting them.

beloit-bioarch.bsky.social•37 days ago

What an excellent resource! Totally sharing with the students in my quant class.

mekline.bsky.social•37 days ago

It's so good!!

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